I am wondering when FBA will start maximizing delivery backhaul for FC inbound shipments. Case quantities pickup up on delivery routes like UPS will cut logistics costs and avoid empty delivery vans and trailers between FC’s.
Thousands of empty delivery drivers heading to domicile, and empty semi trailers being moved around is a massive logistics drain.
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The real question you need to be concerned with is when are your suppliers going to throw you under the bus to be an Amazon vendor, where even FBA can’t help you.
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The West is more expensive because they are overwhelmed
there with shipments from China and want to discourage US
FBA sellers from shipping there and adding to the backlog.
It is ironic that we are on the West coast, as are most of our
buyers but we are now being directed to ship to PA at twice the
cost and pay a placement fee as well.
Perhaps this will cover Amazon’s cost to ship our items back
to customers on the West coast while freeing up inventory space
on the West coast for overseas shipments.
Agreed.
While creating some shipments today we realized that we
were not only going to have to raise our prices on Amazon but
also continue our increased sales efforts on our other venues to
continue to minimalize how Amazon affects our online business.
Yes another facet of this equation we have had to fight as well.
Even with “abandoned” listings that have no inventory on Walmart
with prices from years ago.
For the first time in a decade we are considering opting out.
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Well, our account just updated with the new shipment workflow. I’ve been looking for a reason to get our website running and I definitely just found it.
Prices all across Amazon for items offered by 3rd party sellers are going to go up.
If we were to send in 1 pallet of a item we send in frequently its now gonna cost about $640, choosing the most economical split/placement option, versus the $180 it would have cost just a month ago. And of course the rebate went hasta la bye bye.
If I select the west as the inbound region, it still requires us to ship down to AZ. If I’m paying $487 solely for placement on a single pallet of product, it should assign it to any one of the 20+ Amazon warehouses here in WA, rather than making me send it all down to AZ.
Amazon is trolling us.
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Also, I’m not sure how Amazon determined sending five unstackable pallets, each weighing 300 lbs and standing 8 inches tall, constitutes optimized use of trailer space. 
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It’s not, hence why the shipping charge is so high. I use SPD so I’m not seeing unreasonable shipping rates. Just no more rebates and higher rates because packages are being sent throughout the country instead of just a local warehouse.
If you were sending larger shipments your 5 split option wouldn’t have a ridiculous cost for the volume you’re sending. It only is now because you’re wasting a bunch of trailer space with a 8" tall pallet which they’re making you pay for.
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Welcome @anon51904725 
that you are here. You will find SAS (Sellers Ask Sellers) an outstanding resource. I think I recall you from the OSFE, it has been a long time.
To the “New Choices” (Looks to me like AKA New Fees) just a data point, we did a shipment late Friday, March 1st about 4pm eastern. A small one, but none of this was presented. It was all as it has been. One location, two days away, no extra fee.
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If we were to send in 5 full pallets of product instead it would cost 3.5 times as much as just the single pallet split into 5. So sure, there’s some savings but the shipping cost is still unreasonably high as they’re routing the shipments to the furthest away possible FC’s
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I bet you’re gonna have a surprise waiting for you upon creation of your next shipment 
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A very real concern something we have obviously dealt with before and I am sure will continue to. We own a B+M store and our own site as well and try to pull away from Amazon as much/best we can.
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An question:
In Setting > FBA > In bound Setting > Inventory placement service fee option for Amazon APIs
This last setting is only for sellers who use some special program to handle their Amazon business, right?
So if we just use Seller central to sent FBA shipment, we don’t have to edit this setting to our preference, right?
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We just started dealing with this as well. A few observations from our experience so far:
-
I think this will be beneficial for most of our SPD shipments. Before this system, most of those were assigned to a single FC, CLT2, which is far from where we are (central Texas). This meant our shipping costs were relatively high, product took quite a bit to become available, and we were much more likely to have issues and delays - if there was a problem with the reception of that one shipment, we were screwed.
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By getting multiple FCs assigned, the risks for that inventory should decrease (we will no longer depend on the luck of a single shipment), product will be will be available faster (we’re getting much closer FCs as part of the splits), and I’ve observed slighltly lower shipping fees with Amazon’s optimized split options than with the single FC shipments we were getting before.
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We’re able to select the no-fee Amazon’s optimized split option for any shipments that have 4 or more cases, so no huge quantities are needed to get that as an option (you can pretty much create case pack configurations with any quantities).
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For some of our heavier products that we ship LTL, though, I’ve been unable to get the no-fee Amazon’s optimized split option, no matter the quantities. This is problematic, as it will reduce our profit margin for those products, although I’m inclined to believe that the availability of that option will vary, depending on demand. We’ll problably have to just raise the price to make up for it (which I already planned to do to offset the the low-stock inventory fee come April 1st).
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Additionally, we’ll now have higher costs for the products from the few suppliers who ship directly to Amazon for us. We normally ship 1-2 cases at most to keep the stock levels lean; we’ll either have to ship in higher quantities (not feasible for products that are not very high volume), or just raise prices to compensate.
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The section’s title apparently specifying the use of APIs is somewhat misleading, as may be seen if one engages the “Edit” function to reach the Inbound Settings Preferences Dashboard here:
https: //sellercentral.amazon.com/fba/settings/index.html/ref=xx_fbasettings_dnav_xx#/inbound-settings
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I agree. It is kind of confusing.
I went ahead and edited to selected " Amazon-optimized shipment splits "as my choice. I figured if it is only for API (which I don’t think I use), it won’t matter what is my choice.
I sent a big shipment on 2/27, so won’t be doing another one for a few weeks. It’d be interesting to see what happens then. Anyway it goes, the cost for sending things to FBA is going up.
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I can only talk about what I’m seeing for myself but I see an actual savings with this system as the inventory placement fees are actually lower.
I had a shipment picked up Friday 3/1 that was split out into 2 LTL shipments to different locations. I already use inventory placement so this is typical costs. One full pallet of product was $216 for inventory placement and $234 for shipping going to central for a total of $450.
I just created a shipment of the exact same product, quantity just to see where I would land. This time it was (estimated) at $195 for placement and $164 for shipping to a central FC for a total of $359 to LCL that pallet.
I checked the 5 locations option with no placement fees just to compare. It was $419 to ship them out with SPD.
I checked 3 locations with SPD as well and it came out to $360 with placement included.
So basically, I can send in one pallet to one location for $359, the same goods SPD to 3 locations for $360 or SPD 5 locations for $454. LTL to 3,5 locations was so ludicrous I didn’t even add them up.
I’m not going to break out the bubbly on this yet as there are too many variables but I don’t see this as all gloom and doom. Play around with your shipments and see what works best.
Good Luck,
TJB
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It’s actually not even going up that much. It’s just that for the past year or so we got all these rebates and hidden discounts on partnered carrier costs, and they been having us send stuff to just local FCs. UPS-hike adjusted, we’re probably paying about the same inbound costs as we were before when everything was mandatory split 3 ways, 1 local, 1 center of the country, 1 cross country. Of course, the cost is going up drastically if you were consistently shipping a single case pack per shipment, in which case that will be penalized in some way now (which is being done intentionally. Shipping a single case pack is something I’ve done a LOT, and I consider that gaming the system at FBA’s expense, so they’re 100% in the right to charge people who do that).
Inbound costs aren’t really shooting up, its more like they decreased substantially sometime last year or so (and anyone who knows how business works knew that wasn’t going to be a forever thing), and now they feel like they’re shooting up because all of the discounts are gone.
Yes, we have already increased prices for all core brand items, and will be culling any/and all low margin items and keeping those for gov/local sales.
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And the battle of wills begins…
We are not making less profit to sell on Amazon.
Suck it Andy Jassy!
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Nail, meet hammer.
I think another big disparity here is sellers of small items and sellers of large items.
Small item sellers should have absolutely zero complaints since all-in FBA fees are cheaper than any other shipping method, and inbound costs per unit are negligible even if they want you to split it 10 ways.
Large item sellers seem to be getting hammered every which way since increasing inventory costs tons of storage money (vs small products you can store 6 months worth of stuff and it costs next to nothing), not increasing it costs low inventory fees. Things need to be shipped LTL which makes it more expensive to split shipments up.
I avoid large products like the plague because all the shipping costs ultimately make the margins suck (especially after returns), and you can only pass on so much to the customer.
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